Even worse is many of the citizens of this 'republic' have been brainwashed by a compulsory education system that they actually live in a democratic republic.
In NK you'd be lucky to get 1 meal a day. Over here poor people are morbidly fat.
And at the end of the day, you're not a prisoner, if you hate it here so much, you can leave this country any day you want to. But can't say the same for people in NK.
If they are pushed to such extremes as to go to North Korea, then it's ultimately your fault, the citizen of a Western country, for allowing your government to take such drastic anti-copyright measures that ultimately lead to corruption and censorship.
Kind of ironic that Internet freedom will be increasingly achieved in our countries by befriending our enemies.
Yeah, no. I didn't vote for these assholes. If you think even part of the nonsense professed by the MafiAA organizations has popular support, you're terribly deluded. I don't take kindly to being told I'm at fault for something I oppose and took every positive and reasonable step available to me to oppose.
As pointed out yesterday on the Bradley Manning discussion, the US is starting to get to the point where it can't credibly criticize other countries for their human rights abuses, given what goes on in this country.
I don't want this to turn into a discussion of whether the US is worse than North Korea, but both have abused - and continue to abuse - human rights in abysmal ways.
Sorry, no. Making the comparison assumes there's some parity, which is completely misleading.
In a different context, it's about as outlandish as claiming the space shuttle is really no different from the wright flyer. After all, both are capable of flight.
Nobody has the right to leave NK
That alone says loads.
The most essential freedom is the freedom to disagree and leave. North Koreans don't have that right.
I don't know if they still do because I haven't kept track, but they did for sure host pedophile message boards in 2005-2006 where pedophiles discussed things like raising children for sex.
Why? I can only guess that it's because they believe in freedom of speech over everything else.
Why would you hold them up to a higher standard?
http://www.businessinsider.com/survivors-liken-north-korean-...
http://www.fastcompany.com/3006452/fast-feed/north-koreas-co...
In the end all this means to me is that I'm going to save the $65 that I was about to spend on a PB hoodie. Assuming TPB are paying for their NK servers, I'd rather not risking providing funds for lil' Kim's holocaust.
To point to a specific example, yesterday I watched George Stephanopoulos interview Dennis Rodman after Rodman's NK trip and George made some comment about the human rights record and to back it up he mentioned that NK has 200,000 folks in prison camps. Based on that logic, the U.S. is 10x worse with 2.2 million people in prison right now.
NK has a bad system of government. Their human rights record leaves much to be desired. But so does the human rights record of every country on earth, including the US.
| Rodman's NK trip
| Based on that logic, the U.S. is 10x worse with
| 2.2 million people in prison right now.
2. Your logic about the numbers doesn't take into account the portion of the population. The US is a lot larger than North Korea. If we translate those numbers into percentages, North Korea has 0.81% of the population in prison, and the U.S. has 0.69% of the population in prison.
3. As bad as the US prison system is, I don't think that it's reach GULAG / Auschwitz levels, which by all accounts NK has.
| Their human rights record leaves much to be
| desired. But so does the human rights record
| of every country on earth, including the US.
[ Note: Nobody wanted to believe that the Holocaust was real in Germany until the troops started liberating the camps. IIRC, there were rumors, but most people basically said what you are saying, though there was probably more out of disbelief that human beings could do such a thing. ]
The US also has 13 times the population. And conditions in US prisons are not comparable to conditions in North Korean prisons.
North Korea is a totalitarian hell hole where there has been an ongoing holocaust of citizens for 6 decades.
Per capita calculations or it is meaningless.
on a more serious note, your country is pushing them to leave their own country. Where to go? To your enemies of course.
Pirate bay has been offered, they haven't accepted it for now.
A traceroute to thepiratebay.se is kind of amusing.
From my home (Sweden), the packets seem to go to Frankfurt, then New York, take a link via an ip which reverses to intelsatone.net to a cambodgian ip (500ms latency right here), then reach the ip 175.45.177.217, assigned to Star Joint Venture Co Ltd. Who seem to be a legitimate North Korea internet provider (or, well, as legitimate as it gets, coming from North Korea). The rest of the traceroute doesn't ping back (edit: 6 hops, which could stay in NK, or lead you back anywhere in the world).
If it's a joke, it's a very elaborate one.
http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/fakeroute/ can be seen as previous work that it is practical to do something like this.
Altering routing companies sending traffic through in bulk from Germany-NY-Satellite is far more difficult, but we may see them do this anyway. Time will tell.
... 2914 39138 22351 131279 51040
... [NTT America/ARIN] [rrbone/RIPE] [Intelsat/ARIN] [STAR JOINT VENTURE/APNIC] [The Pirate Bay/RIPE]
Apart from that /24, STAR JOINT VENTURE only advertises 175.45.176.0/22 (albeit as four /24, idiotically enough). What's kind of interesting is that this /22 is visible with a much shorter AS path:
... 3257 4837 131279
... [Tinet/RIPE] [China Netcom/APNIC] [STAR JOINT VENTURE/APNIC]
The question is: Is is deliberate that the Chinese don't allow transit of the Pirate Bay /24 through their network? (As opposed to Intelsat, a Washington-based American company.)
cr1.ipls# sh ip bgp regexp 51040$
BGP table version is 210945139, local router ID is 8.30.x.255
Status codes: s suppressed, d damped, h history, * valid, > best, i - internal,
r RIB-failure, S Stale
Origin codes: i - IGP, e - EGP, ? - incomplete
Network Next Hop Metric LocPrf Weight Path
*> 194.14.56.0 4.69.180.161 0 0 3356 5580 3.987 51040 i
*> 194.71.107.0 4.69.180.161 0 0 3356 2914 39138 22351 2.207 51040 i
EDIT: I'm gonna dig into my database and see what the path looked like a day or two ago.
EDIT: 2 days ago: the .107/24 path: 3356 3549 16150 51040
16150 is "Availo Networks AB" and they do appear to do heavy prefix filtering -- as they should -- but I see no import policy for 51040:
$ whois -h whois.ripe.net AS16150
...
(BTW: that really broke google for a long time. google will revert your language to the automatically discovered one, even after you use their magic url that should prevent this)
The IP addresses allocated to the ISP I work for are "officially located" (according to my ARIN POC records) in the city I live in (specifically, at my PO Box). We ($ISP) don't even provide service in that city.
It's OK to support freedom of information, and also recognize TPB for what it really is.
It's the industry's job to ask me what distribution channel I want to use, not dictate what channel they require me to use. When they figure that out, they'll start making money again.
If you don't like it, you don't have to buy their content, but it doesn't give you the right to bootleg it.
If a content maker doesn't like it, they don't have to use a big publishing house that restricts their sales avenues, but they also know they're probably going to make less money that way.
TL;DR:
TPB allows downloads unapproved by content producers: YES
Banner ads are key to allowing this: NO
Banner ads mean they aren't nonprofit: YES*
Banner ads mean they are taking money from content producers: NO
What does the magnitude of TPB's profit have to do with anything? The morality of an action is determined by how much the offender profits monetarily?
The content creators invest effort, money, and years of their lives to produce the content. A typical movie, for instance, represents the collective work of hundreds of people spanning several years. Of course they'll need to charge more to generate a profit. And TPB only needs banner ads to generate the profit. What's your point?
> "...rapidshare, that you can make a good argument are taking money from content producers."
You seem to have bought into this farce that people who download pirated content are categorically unwilling to pay money for non-pirated content. This is complete bs.
My nephews and his friends don't spend money on music, since they can easily get it for free online and it lets them spend their money on other stuff. Are you claiming that if these kids grew up in the 70s or 80s, none of them would listen to music because they'd all be against spending their money on it? BS.
"Taking money from content producers" doesn't just mean I've taken ten dollars out of some musician's wallet and put that same ten dollars into my wallet. It could mean taking ten dollars out of a musician's wallet, putting a dollar into mine, and burning the rest. Or burning it all. From the perspective of the musician, the result is the same.
> "Banner ads are key to allowing this: NO"
My argument was that, based on their actions and words, profit or notoriety are more likely their motivations than a principled stand on freedom of speech, as many here want to attribute to TPB. The Westboro Baptist Church is also defended by the freedom of speech. That doesn't mean we should hold up the Westboro Baptist Church as noble crusaders in a fight for our freedoms. That gives them way too much credit.
On the other hand, if the consumers collectively decide to subvert this process and set the price at zero, where does that leave the author? Their message is "I'm going to take your work and pay you nothing for it. Get back to us when you can offer us a better deal than something for nothing."
Which option seems like a better system to you? Technology has made taking content and paying nothing for it a frictionless transaction. Many people here seem to believe that since technology has enabled it, or made it so easy, or made it so difficult to regulate, it therefore must be a natural right that we've had all along, but can only now fully enjoy due to the miracles of modern technology.
If some group on the supply side gains a monopoly, the government in theory steps in and regulates to protect the consumer from price gouging. This notion appeals to us, that when one party in the holds all the cards, they shouldn't use exploit that power to price gouge. Yet when the consumers suddenly hold all the cards, we turn a blind eye to imbalance in power.
I'm not saying that movie studios and record labels should be protected so that they can cling to old distribution methods. But expecting authors, or anyone on the supply side, to offer a price as good as free is not a reasonable expectation.
And since we are supposed to have democracy here, maybe it's a valid reason?
traceroute thepiratebay.se output:
12 INTELSAT-IN.car1.NewYork1.Level3.net (64.156.82.14) 127.129 ms 121.898 ms 121.857 ms
13 209.159.170.215 (209.159.170.215) 214.763 ms 196.291 ms 210.602 ms
14 202.72.96.6 (202.72.96.6) 697.258 ms 711.336 ms 693.061 ms
15 175.45.177.217 (175.45.177.217) 696.368 ms 699.046 ms 702.013 ms
Huh.
I know DPRK has bigger problems, but the exposure isn't bad. TPB isn't in a position to free the people, so I can't concur with those who claim this is somehow ignorant of those issues. Times are changing there. Channels are opening up. These guys may serve a greater purpose, even if it's not today.
That server is in Germany, no way it's possible to have 50ms to NK. Also traditional traceroute has 500ms+ RTT.
They are faking/spoofing the ICMP responses. They are also prepending their route advertisement with corresponding AS paths to further disguise it.
From TeliaSonera looking glass http://lg.telia.net/
194.71.107.0/24 *[BGP/170] 02:10:36, MED 0, localpref 150, from 80.91.255.255 AS path: 2914 39138 22351 131279 51040 I
AS39138 is probably the real upstream provider of TBP. They peer with AS51040(TPB network) and TPB router prepends AS22351(Intelsat) and AS131279(North Korean ISP) into it's AS Path before advertising it to AS39138.
I get about 40 ms from south germany and about 30 ms from france to thepiratebay.se ; but almost 400 ms to www.kcna.kp
In other words, the Western countries' belief in 'freedom of speech' is starting to seem as shallow as the word 'Democratic' in the 'Democratic People's Republic of Korea'.
It's really easy to brush off the fact that hundreds of people worked to make that movie you downloaded for free, especially when you never have to look any one of them in the eye.
These days with things like netflix, itunes, and amazon prime, the only excuse one can make for participating in piracy is destitution. I totally understand those who wouldn't have been able to acquire the goods anyway doing so by using the pirate bay and other services. In this sense, they're kind of a decentralized information welfare program. Most countries have this already, and it's called a library. Too bad most libraries haven't caught up with the information age yet. So the piracy services have been filling a very important spot.
I'd strongly urge everyone not to use the pirate bay. North Korea is an oppressive country that would nuke the US in a heartbeat.
It makes me sick that so many people idolize these guys.
Before you rationalize your piracy in response to my post, please sound out the word: "rational" "lies"
If this is in fact true, and not a gag, it's an overt political statement, and one I couldn't disagree with more.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, 3 MARCH 102, 평양 (PYONGYANG).
The Pirate Bay has been hunted in many countries around the world. Not for illegal activities but being persecuted for beliefs of freedom of information. Today, a new chapter is written in the history of the movement, as well as the history of the internets.
A week ago we could reveal that The Pirate Bay was accessed via Norway and Catalonya. The move was to ensure that these countries and regions will get attention to the issues at hand. Today we can reveal that we have been invited by the leader of the republic of Korea, to fight our battles from their network.
This is truly an ironic situation. We have been fighting for a free world, and our opponents are mostly huge corporations from the United States of America, a place where freedom and freedom of speech is said to be held high. At the same time, companies from that country is chasing a competitor from other countries, bribing police and lawmakers, threatening political parties and physically hunting people from our crew. And to our help comes a government famous in our part of the world for locking people up for their thoughts and forbidding access to information.
We believe that being offered our virtual asylum in Korea is a first step of this country's changing view of access to information. It's a country opening up and one thing is sure, they do not care about threats like others do. In that way, TPB and Korea might have a special bond. We will do our best to influence the Korean leaders to also let their own population use our service, and to make sure that we can help improve the situation in any way we can. When someone is reaching out to make things better, it's also ones duty to grab their hand.
Posted 24 mins ago by Kim Jung-Bay
Seriously?
The Pirate Bay's "freedom of information" posturing is a complete farce. The site exists for the sole purpose of making money for its operators. Messages like this one, whether satire or not, expose the site for what it is. It makes money by ripping content from the distribution channels chosen by the content authors, repackaging it, and giving it away for free while raking in advertising dollars. In the process, they deny content authors the freedom to select channel of distribution that will allow them to be compensated for their work.
Technology has paved the way for improved means of distributing content, but this is not it.
The only upside of TPB is that it will disrupt the existing content delivery chain enough to force some innovation in a space dominated by a few very large and very stagnant players.
I guess nobody updated their IPs, though:
So North Korea will now have access to the entire Western World's culture catalog? For Free?! I wonder how Kim Jong Un will exploit that.
And now anyone who downloads a torrent from TPB has potentially been compromised? Or is that alarmist?
Understand the difference between the torrent file and the actual data and all shall be revealed.
The part that owns computers, sure.
That's the wrong one, though.
Republic of Korea = South
Democratic People's Republic of Korea = North
That's not denial of the existence of other Korea, and not "we're the true Korea"; it's more that there is only one Korea, it's the entire peninsula, and this unfortunate state of affairs where there are currently two separate governments isn't an indication that there are two Koreas. There's one Korea. The whole thing.
I asked the guides specifically so I think I've got it more or less right.
It should make you uneasy that they have to go to North Korea to keep the site online. While they are not martyrs for an easy to grasp cause, and their definition of 'free speech' may fly in the face of yours, they are doing their absolute best to keep alive what they think is important. This has recently resulted in much irony. Irony that I'm sure they're proud of.
You should hate this. That's the point. This wasn't done so people could keep downloading movies illegally, this was done to make a statement, to get you to think. So please, ice your knee, and think.
Here is what they think:
"This is truly an ironic situation. We have been fighting for a free world, and our opponents are mostly huge corporations from the United States of America, a place where freedom and freedom of speech is said to be held high. At the same time, companies from that country is chasing a competitor from other countries, bribing police and lawmakers, threatening political parties and physically hunting people from our crew. And to our help comes a government famous in our part of the world for locking people up for their thoughts and forbidding access to information."
Is this false?
By doing that, it illustrates just how ridiculous the current copyright situation is.
Nicely played Piratebay, nicely played.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/pirate-bay-plans-...
The idea that it would even be feasible for TPB to host in North Korea is ridiculous. The fact that they already have a history of pranks about their hosting should be a big clue.
Seriously this is mind boggling! I can't believe it has come to that!
I guess that's the modern difference between "rogue" and "first world" as far as censorship goes. The former block because of threats to the political regime. The latter because of threats to corporate profits.
This is a masterful 'fuck you' to the establishment and at the same time an olive branch to the internet generation all over the World. The people who will be running the World in 20, 30, 40 years - when he is still in power.
-It's a crapshoot or manipulation game to hit the front page
-People downvote logical arguments they simply disagree with
Children of the Secret State - North Korea https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6441601/
Inside - Undercover in North Korea https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6136295/
Comrades and Strangers: Behind the Closed Doors of North Korea https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6899842/
The Vice Guide to North Korea https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/5378291/
National Geographic Explorer ~ Inside North Korea https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6110419/
It will be interesting to see how serious their new overlord is about that "freedom of speech thing". My guess is that sooner or later, some of those films will suddenly vanish from the site.
Of course it's serious.
edit: I thought it's a joke... but the traceroute trully ends in North Korea with the 175.45.177.217 IP.
So ... maybe it's actualy legit.
I don't know what to trust anymore.
How noble. Good thing that they found refuge in the country that basically is one big concentration camp. Can't make this stuff up.
Trace 216.81.59.173 to see the effect if you haven't seen it already.
We have a client in a chinese data center where they would just turn off the power randomly because the government said so.
Not to mention the unscheduled blackouts.
But, the irony of the Politics makes strange bedfellows does not seem lost on them.
but oh well, I have a wiggly feeling in my mouth each time I read this, I don't know, whether this is funny or world changing or ironic or god knows what. The internet has melted a new barrier.
Cheers to THE BAY!
